Visual surveillance data may include images obtained from a plurality of different viewpoints. For example, the navy may use surveillance images from an overhead view obtained by a satellite and from a side or oblique view obtained by an Unmanned Aircraft System (“UAS”). The images captured by the satellite may include ships having known identities. One or more of these ships may be classified as be-on-the-lookout (“BOLO”) ships and stored in a BOLO database when their locations and activities are of particular interest.
A ship verification task for maritime Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (“ISR”) requires a ship found in an image captured by a UAS to be compared against the ships in the BOLO database to determine whether the ship in the UAS image is, in fact, one of the ships in the BOLO database. As the images captured by the UAS are from a different viewpoint than the images captured by the satellite, this often makes a manual determination difficult and subject to human error. Therefore, what is desirable is an improved system and method for rapidly and accurately determining the likelihood that a ship in an image captured from a first viewpoint is the same ship that is in a different image captured from a second viewpoint.